How To Generate A Social Media Following

December 18, 2016

How To Generate A Social Media Following

It’s safe to say that 2016 has been the year of social media. Every man, woman and child now seems to have at least some form of social media account and the same goes for most businesses also. If you’re not getting involved in social media and more importantly, social media marketing in this day and age, then you’re not going to succeed. It’s that simple. Social media can make a business, any business and equally, if you don’t have a presence, it can be your downfall. That might seem like a bit of an exaggeration, but trust me, it’s only going one way, and you don’t want to end up being left behind. Resting on your laurels is the worst thing you can do if you’re running an online business. You need to move with the times.

This article is going to quickly run through some of the ideas you need to consider when it comes to social media and the marketing of your business socially. Hopefully, you’ll find it both engaging and ultimately useful.

The Benefits

There are numerous benefits from both having a large social media following and having your content shared. The obvious one is traffic. The more people who have eyes on your content, the more visitors you’ll get to your site. The same goes for your social following. The more people following you, the easier it is to get eyes on fresh content you produce.

There are also many benefits to be had from the likes of Google. They monitor activity across the social networks for your brand and site. These are known as social signals and can boost your rankings in the organic version of Google if you have a significant amount.

Produce Relevant, Shareable Content

They say content is king and this couldn’t be more true. If you want to attract shares, you need content, and lots of it. But not just any old content. You need content that people are going to find interesting, and content that is related to your sector or the product and service you offer. You can’t be creating content solely with the intention of “going viral”. That isn’t going to work, and even if it did, any traction gained would not be of much use from a commercial aspect.

A good example I found recently is one from HostPresto.com who are writing technology tutorials for their readers. Information like installing applications and server optimization, etc. They’re accepted well as they’re both useful to their audience, and also useful to other people. This means they get shared, discussed and also linked. This is the type of goal you should be aiming for.

Going Viral

This is of course is what everyone wants to achieve. Anyone who knows anything about social media will know that going viral is considered the holy grail of any social media marketing campaign, but it’s rare. You need to produce a piece of content that is so compelling that anyone who lays eyes on it will want to show their friends, family or even people they don’t particularly like. But it’s a challenge, and there is no sure fire formula to achieve it. The saying goes, shoot for the moon, and if you miss, don’t worry, you’ll land amongst the stars. This is true to some extent with social media, as even if your content does not “catch fire”, it may still pick up a significant number of valuable shares and interactions.

Comments Are Still Important

Blog comments in particular have received a lot of bad press over the years, primarily due to people abusing them, and effectively posting nonsense just to reap the SEO benefits. Even webmasters posting nonsense just to keep their page fresh. That sort of approach no longer works, and rightly so. But blog comments can still be a great way for you to interact with your audience. Most of the people who comment will engage with you if you actively answer them, that person may write you back with a one liner, and could become a social media follower. Or even better, a return customer.

Traffic isn’t easy to come by and each visitor you’re lucky enough to receive needs to have a significant amount of effort spent on them in the hope that they either share, comment, follow or even come back as a customer. The above is obviously a tiny snapshot, and there is much more to it if you want to truly become a social media powerhouse, a Twitter god or Instagram king. But it does cover the basics. And if you apply the above, you’ll most definitely have some kind of success. It takes time, effort and perseverance, but the rewards can be epic for both your business and you personally.